No doubt the heathenism of the first races, so far as we can trace it, and the early legends and rites of the oldest times that we are acquainted with, appear to be already involved in a perplexing confusion of the strangest fancies. Nothing better are they than a chaos of symbolical images of nature, mingled and interwoven with some vague and shadowy outlines of truly spiritual ideas and thoughtful notes of a higher strain, and also with ambiguous and enigmatical legends of historical tradition. The whole medley, moreover, differently developed, according to the peculiar varieties of national character, or the hereditary feeling of tribe and family, assumes a particular hue from the local colorings of these different spheres of life; or, moreover, as is not unfrequently the case, is remolded and cast into new combinations by the arbitrary caprices of the poetic fancy. Who can hope to find the simple clew of such a maze? or who will give us the threads of Ariadne to guide us out of its intricacies? It is true, generally speaking, that our historical knowledge and research do not reach very far back. The Flood, to which the traditions of all people remount, and which all telluric sciences, whether geography, or natural history, or geology, or whatever other name they may bear, directly or indirectly confirm, forms an impassable gulf between the modern and later family of man, and that first and gigantic race of the antediluvian world. And yet careful criticism and historical investigation are still able to distinguish in the chaotic congeries of different mythologies the several strata and epochs, and can separate the primary rock of the earlier natural legend from the later mythical formations. But even this primary rock itself, amid the legends of primeval times--this first, and oldest, and simplest basis of heathenism, is itself but a fusion and the _debris_ of some earlier and precedent convulsion. But now all legends, every mythology, and universal tradition, agree in this one point. They concur in deriving the origin of man from God, and assert that the first man, who, while he proceeded immediately from God, was also the first-born son of earth, in which he was placed, because it was of a nature nearest akin to his and ours. Now this same first man, as proceeding and taking his beginning from God, could not well be without some knowledge of Him. The concurrent tradition of all nations leads us to the idea of man’s possessing knowledge, and in truth an immediate and intuitive knowledge of God in and out of nature, and indeed primarily and principally from this source, and on the other hand also of his having an immediate and intuitive knowledge of nature in God. And this exactly is the old and true Gentilism of the holy patriarchs of the primeval world, if by this term we understand the original religion of nature, among the earliest families, and the pious patriarchs of the human race, as it is described